So like everyone on the planet, I decided to pick up Overwatch (On PC because I’m not an peasant), and have come to the conclusion after reaching the meagre level of 17, that it is good. Not great, not amazing, not even very good. just good. I like the art style, I like that it didn’t make half the game a pre-order bonus, and I especially like Tracer, also known as the redemption of the British. Besides that and the slightly above average shooting variety, there’s not actually much else that I would instantly think of as reason to recommend it. I can however think of a shit-ton of reasons to not recommend. An now I start to feel the joys of having a blog that no one reads, because no one is going to email me with complaints about how their experience was different and therefore I am unequivocally wrong.
After having played the beta up to about level 11 or 12, I decided that I would go out and buy the full game. I don’t have a job, but hey, money grows on trees so it’s no biggie. FYI, essentially the only content of this post will be me tearing into this game even though I think it is actually pretty decent, so just in case some of those people who were dropped on their heads and have already forgotten that I said it was good at the beginning, I felt that I should just put a reminder here. Overall, I enjoyed the beta, probably more than I enjoy the full game. For starters, I don’t remember the beta being anywhere near as unstable in terms of connection as the full game is. Now, admittedly, only once have I actually fully lost connection to a game and been kicked due to server issues, but the bevy of other problems with the connection to the game were some of the worst I have ever seen in a multilayer game. Just to add context, I live in Australia, so being fucked over by internet connections is something that we have to deal with on a regular basis. Like feeding the kangaroo and defending the house from convicts, it’s just something that we learn to deal with, but even with Australia’s (admittedly shit) version of NBN, the game was filled with more lag than a mid 2000’s MMO. For starters, the game has these momentary pauses in connection once or twice every match, in which my character moves around perfectly, but the enemies all stand running in place and all of my abilities stop working (although in the case of Tracer’s absolutely useless pulse bomb, that might actually increase my chances of survival). I would normally… maybe… probably not be willing to blame this on said NBN and it’s terrible implementation, but considering that I never had this problem in the beta nor in my time playing Black Ops 3 (yes I played it and I have to scrub myself every night to wash away the guilt), I think that I can safely blame it on terrible servers.
Unfortunately, these terrible server problems didn’t just manifest as moments that felt like walking through a wax museum, but also as your more traditional get shot around a corner, which I am no stranger to. I must however complain again at how extreme the problem is. Whilst in other games I might get shot around the corner by the skin of my teeth (I’m pretty sure I just used that wrong), in Overwatch you could only say it was by the skin of my teeth if I were James William Bottomtooth III, which for those of you who didn’t just remember that one guy from Family Guy, means that I would be a good few metres around the corner before the game helpfully informs me that Mcree has re-enacted the ending of Django on my face. This is almost more of a problem than the random freezes because at least during those I could mash the E button and hope that the connection would un-fuck itself before the animation of tracer rewinding time finished.
Server issues are by no means the only problem that I have with Overwatch however. I wish to now talk about balance. For those of you who don’t want to hear legitimate criticisms with the game, I urge you to suck it up and listen anyway so that you can maybe see that the game isn’t some sort of second coming of Christ. For those who don’t know, balance refers to the equality of each character in the game, and how viable they are relative to each other in any given situation. Any of you who want to tell me that the some characters are deliberately better in some situations than others, I want to tell you that I too looked at the marketing for the game. It’s no secret that each character is intended to have a slightly better ability to come out on top in certain situations, and I don’t even have that much of a problem with that. What I have a problem with is that some characters can essentially hard counter. Whatever definition you have for that word, throw it away because I’m about to make it fit myself. As I see it, hard countering is when one character will almost always have the advantage over another, meaning that there is no skill involved in the gun play, it basically means who decides to pussy out first and pick Bastion (an no, it’s not always bastion that I get hard countered by, but he’s the easiest target because he’s the most broken). As an example of this, say I chose to play as Tracer, which isn’t too hard to imagine, because I only play Tracer. We’ll get to why later. As I run around a corner, I see Mcree. ‘Oh, no!’ I think to myself, this is going to be an uphill struggle, Mcree’s accuracy will make him a formidable foe for someone with such a little health pool as me. It is at this point that Mcree does what he always does, and throws a stun grenade and instantly kills me. And this is what will happen every time I face Mcree as tracer. There is no skill involved in 99% of the gun play, it all comes down to who has the better abilities.
In the great ability battle, Tracer gets bent over a table (but not sexually, because sexualizing anyone female is instantly wrong and evil but it’s OK to set ridiculous male body standards). On paper, her abilities paradoxical sound like they should be amazing. The ability to rewind her timeline and revert to a point where she had more health, the ability to zip out of the way of incoming fire and the ability to throw a ‘time-bomb-thing.’ They all sound basically unbeatable. Unfortunately, that is not true. Now, this is just speculation, and I don’t have any code or game file data in front of me, but a lot of these abilities don’t work as they’re meant to. Some of these issues could just be down to connection issues and I’d be slightly less likely to burn down the Blizzard office buildings if that were the case, but they deserve mention anyway. Tracers ability to jump a few moments forward in her timeline sounds cool, as it essentially means that she can get safely from one point to the other, but more than once, I would perform it and then be killed part way through. At this point, it’s hard to tell if it’s server issues or not, but I’m inclined to think that it’s actually possible to kill Tracer during her time jump, as when you watch the kill cam you can clearly see tracer enter her little light effect and then get kicked right out of it. This is most noticeable when Roadhog uses his chain to pull you close to him, which often would grab me after I’d already jumped, sometimes pulling me through a wall just to get to him. This is less of a balance issue and more of a quirk with the systems of the game however, so think of that what you will.
Let me list of all of the hard counters to tracer, i.e. all of the abilities that are guaranteed to kill her as the render most of her abilities completely useless.
- Mcree’s stun grenade
- Roadhog’s chain
- Junkrat’s trap (seriously, why can’t I at least reverse time out of this, there is no reason why I shouldn’t be able to
- Literally anything Bastion can do (but this is more of a problem with bastion being too powerful against everyone)
- Torbjorn’s turret (this is the only situation in which I am willing to admit that it may actually be somewhat decent design to try and force me to play as someone other than Tracer to take it down, but I refuse to do that)
- Some others that I can’t quite remember, but trust me, there are others
- And Bastion again
These should be abilities that give these characters a slight edge over me, not abilities that will almost always put me in a near un-win-able situation. An example of good a good counter to Tracer is Symmetra. Her turrets do just enough damage to mean that if I don’t approach them carefully I will be at a disadvantage, but are also not so powerful as to mean that the second they even look at me I am dead. Seriously, fuck Bastion. Symmetra’s good design doesn’t stop there however. Her weapon has the ability to do some serious damage to Tracer, but if I can keep my distance using my abilities, I can win the fight. This is the prefect example of two characters who exemplify the design that I want to see more of in Overwatch, where Symmetra may have turrets and a weapon on her side that can ruin Tracer’s shit faster than a possible sexual partner saying that they support Trump whilst on a date, but if the Tracer player spends just a few seconds to position themselves and move tactically then they can win. Being able to put thought into a situation and being rewarded doesn’t happen nearly enough in this game. If, say for example Mcree’s grenade had half a second in which it bounced on the ground and I had time to dodge it if I was perceptive enough, then he would instantly become a far better designed character, because he would be a counter, not a hard counter to tracer. He would beat a Tracer who doesn’t think tactically and quickly, rather than beat any Tracer who accidentally walks into him. I should be able to recognize that Mcree is there and that I need to get out of the way or I will die, rather than run into him wonder how hard it would be to remove the hard drive from my computer and microwave it.
I don’t particularly want to talk too much more about how blisteringly awful the balance in this game is unless someone, god forbid, gets the idea that I haven’t accepted that it’s going to be my game of the year whether I like it or not, so I will finish this section by saying that the example I gave about Mcree is by no means the only issue that could be easily resolved, and quickly provide a way to make bastion not be the universally despised character by everyone who doesn’t play him. Get rid of his tank ability and make his turret ability his special that can charge up fairly quickly. This will remove the ability for him to one shot essentially everyone who has the nerve to leave their spawn, and make his turret ability something more than an overpowered crutch for players who got bored of waiting for their balls to drop and decided to pack it in. Failing that, can you secretly program the game to make the computers of anyone who plays him more than once a day over the level of 10 explode? Please? I’ll forgive you for charging me $80 for an online only shooter if you do. Probably. Maybe. We’ll see.
So that’s all I can really muster the energy to say on the topic of Overwatch. Needless to say, in the hypothetical event that someone reads this and decides that I misinterpreted my own understanding of fun, I shall once again remind you that I do actually think this game is pretty good. Not great or excellent or anything. Just good. And for the most part, that can be enough. In between all of the massive problems that apparently only I have with this game, is a genuinely amazing title. I’d actually quite like to play that game Blizzard if you don’t mind, and you can allow me to if you just make a few alterations. I understand that stuff like radically redesigning Bastion’s move set is a big ask, but things like Mcree’s grenade aren’t really that big of a hassle to balance. If your ever stuck, just look at the dichotomy between Tracer and Symmetra and remind yourself of what level of balance you need.
Oh, and I’ve saved the best bit for last, why do I play Tracer? Because I like Tracer. She’s a pretty interesting character, she isn’t a stereotype, deliberate or otherwise (Fucking hell Kotaku, Soldier 76 is a deliberate joke about standard gruff soldiers from other games; leave the liberal agenda at the door). As much as I actually do think that a lot of this game is creative, as specially if you haven’t heard of Team Fortress 2, a lot of the characters are extremely 1 dimensional, having singular character traits. Allow me to list them. I imagine that some people will interoperate some of these as me being racist, so I shall tell them to fuck of now, I have no legitimately intent on offending anyone racially, but I have no problem offending people who feel like arguing about me stating facts about the character design.
- Bastion: Good robot
- D.va: An Asian
- Gengi: A Japanese warrior
- Hanzo: A different Japanese warrior
- Junk rat: Literally the Joker if he were Australian
- Lucio: The black one
- McRee: The cowboy
- Mei: The other Asian
- Mercy: Actually, I don’t really know, she’s pretty good, but I want to say that having no character traits doesn’t make it better
- Pharah: DEATH FROM ABOVE. Literally all I know about her
- Reaper: Literally, how cliché can you get with angst?
- Reinhardt: Kinda like Mercy in that there’s not much character unless you look for a Bio somewhere, but I originally thought that he was a bad guy but then one of the trailers showed him as good so I’m just going to award the best plot award to Blizzard now and save the academy the trouble
- Roadhog: A fat guy
- Soldier: 76: Not going to call them out on this one because it’s deliberate
- Symmetra: Ok, so maybe Lucio wasn’t the token black one, but c’mon, a black guy with dreadlocks who is also a rapper. Are you shitting me.?
- Torbjorn: Oh look, a dwarf who is an engineer. Oh, and he’s Swedish, s that’s two character traits, good job. Wait, he has an Ikea style spray. That’s actually pretty funny. I hate Torbjorn though. That god damned turret
- Tracer: Literally the most interesting character. Seriously, she has a cool back story, her character design is novel and interesting and she’s not what you would expect to find in a shooter
- Widow maker: evil French sniper
- Winston: OK, so maybe Tracer isn’t the only one you wouldn’t expect to be in a shooter, but Winston is just a gorilla who happens to have the intelligence of a genius human. That’s already a concept that we’ve seen before
- Zarya: Everyone’s already called out the fact that she’s a typical Russian body builder, but she kinda has a quirky personality in how she acts and moves which I find interesting. Sort of. Not enough to redeem her
- Zenyatta: Another good robot. Way to go
Yeah, I get that when you have so many characters it’s practically impossible to have each of them be fully realized people with interesting back stories, but considering how only maybe 5 or 6 of the characters on this list I unfairly labelled as being one dimensional, I’d say that overall, they could have done a lot better. Maybe they will eventually, but until that time, I’m going to go now. Have fun with Overwatch. Don’t let me stop you. Just keep in mind that a lot of why we think it’s so great is because it was engineered by a company who excels and making you think that everything is great. Every step that they have taken has made Overwatch look more and more amazing to everyone. Wait a minute. Blizzard has 8 letters. Illuminati has 10 letters. 10-8 is 2. There are 2 robots in Overwatch. One of them’s name starts with the letter B, and is the first character whose name appears in the alphabet. The other’s name starts with Z and is the last character’s name to appear in the alphabet. There are 26 letters in the alphabet. There are 25 letters between B and Z. 26-25 is 1. The Roman numeral for 1 is I. Illuminati starts with an I. Bastion only speaks in incoherent beeps and boops. Zenyatta only talks about acceptance and ideology. What if Bastion’s beeps and boops are subliminal Illuminati propaganda and were all being subconsciously told to accept it by Zenyatta? Prove me wrong Blizzard. You have 24 hours.
Y, Though? 